It's semi-sad that This Is My Jam is closing. Sharing music with friends is always good, but This Is My Jam seemed a bit like an idea someone had one afternoon, spent three days knocking into shape, then left alone. It didn't really evolve or sort out the rough edges.
This Is My Jam never seemed to exist in and of itself — you'd only know if someone had a 'new jam' if you saw it in their Twitter stream or whatever. For us the best thing about This Is My Jam was the way you could sort of sub-tweet (sub-jam?) events, or sidestep the usual clichés in the event of a musician popping their clogs by celebrating their music rather than bashing out a trite 'RIP WILL BE MUCH MISSED' tweet.
Anyway considering it hasn't really been developed or properly exploited it's no surprise This Is My Jam is closing next month.
But where next for song sharing services you don't really use but remember every now and again?
Hiya Cymbal!
Coincidentally we only signed up for Cymbal yesterday. A friend told us to do it. Yes we only have one follower in the screengrab below, don't judge us. We all have to start somewhere.
The things going for Cymbal include:
1. It looks fucking nice, and so it bloody well should do considering it's already had over a million dollars chucked at it.
2. It works properly on mobile, mainly because it actually only seems to exist as an app. (Their website seems to be down at the moment but they do have a Facebook page if you want more info.) We've seen a few 'WhatsApp for music' / 'Tinder for music' apps floating around over the last year or so but this looks like it's a lot better. (It's basically Instagram for music.)
3. Where This Is My Jam relied heavily on YouTube and Vimeo (with a bit of SoundCloud thrown in), Cymbal pulls its music from Spotify and SoundCloud, which works a lot better.
4. It's just a really nice thing.
Anyway if you have an iPhone you can get it here.
If you're on Android this looks like just another lesson in why you should have got a proper phone.